Blog Archive

Welcome to the Blog Archive for Itowler.com

You can use this to browse older postings, by year and then month. To get started, just click on a year, and then click on the month that you are interested, and you will be shown all of the blog posts in that year and month.

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours, or days. All things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame, and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned, or what you owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear. So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived, at the end. It won’t matter whether your beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

Today is 3.14 2007, or Pi day if you are in the know. Pi, is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference (around the circle) of a circle to its diameter (across the circle). Pi is usually calculated to 3 digits, 3.14. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. There is no end to Pi! With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 51 billion decimal places to date.

The number is so long that there are actually contests to see who can recite the most places in Pi. Earlier this year a man from Pennsylvania recited 12,887 digits, to be exact. It took him 3 hours and 40 minutes to do it. When he ended, he became the North American record holder. The previous record holder had recited Pi to 10,980 places.

Consider that the United States Government is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States don’t you think it’s time for them to become a model of energy efficiency? A first step could be to require all federal buildings to use more efficient light bulbs, AND ask our bureaucrats to turn off their computers at night. According to a 1999 report by the Alliance to Save Energy, the federal government consumes about 32% more energy per square foot than the nations building stock at large.

A recent posting in the Wall Street Journal a discussion on the resurgence of the City of Chicago has a quote from Russian writer, Vasily Grossman, “Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom,spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything is lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow”